Wheel loaders, track loaders and other loading machines are equipped with buckets for the purpose of digging, loading and transporting all manner of different materials. Materials in a loose state such as sand, gravel, rock, soil, mulch, salt and still others are commonly moved about a worksite or from a pile into another machine for transport. One application at mine sites is the loading of blasted rock such as ore or overburden into a truck for disposal or transport to a processing site. A loader will typically drive into a pile of material with the bucket at a cutting or digging angle, generally but not always a horizontal bucket orientation, and then commence curling the bucket upon or slightly after entering the pile. The bucket is typically curled back to a racked position, the loader backs out of the pile, and then transports the bucket load to a dump site or into the bed of a truck. The same basic cycle can be repeated many times.
The overall efficiency of the process can vary dependent upon a number of factors, but in general it is desired to execute the capture and dump cycle as quickly as possible and with the bucket as full as possible. There can be tradeoffs in bucket filling versus cycle time that are managed to various ends. Moreover, the type of material and properties of the material or the pile itself such as particle size, moisture content, pile steepness, and still other factors can introduce variation and unpredictability to the manner in which the machine and bucket interact with the pile of material.
Those skilled in the art will be familiar with the wide variety of technologies developed over the years that attempt to improve upon the basic processes of loader operation and construction. Different bucket configurations, materials, and bucket construction techniques have been developed that are tailored to material type and/or loader operating environment, machine or implement system configurations, and other factors. U.S. Pat. No. 8,695,240 to Mills et al. is one example bucket design and entitled Machine Bucket Assembly. Mills et al. propose a bucket having a top section, a bottom section, and a curved middle section, with geometry configured to provide a loadability index within a target range.